Anarcute Released! Will the Revolution be Cute?

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If you were really into Rampage (or willfully and cruelly razing your SimCities, or taking the ladder out of the SimPool) you know that there’s something satisfying about total wanton destruction. Super serious Anarchists might want to stay away from Anarcute [official site], however.

Once upon a time it was a zombie apocalypse sim but its French makers, aptly named Anarteam, decided that taking on The Government was the way to go. But it’s animals! Kawaii animals. They’re bigheaded and extremely excitable. There are pugs and axolotls! It’s a salamander. Or a newt. Either way, it’s pink and damn cute, and I’m sold.

From trailers, it appears you spend most of the time pulling down the fabric of your cute society to reveal the cruelty beneath, avoiding the brainwash patrol, and gathering rioters with the added bonus of collecting a myriad of cuties. Oh, and killing other not-as-cute animals in riot gear and gas masks. It’s unclear what kind of animal the police are. I won’t take a guess. Anyway, Anarcute is part Rampage, part Katamari, and part riot.

It’s won a whole slew of awards and several of the development team are members of the Klondike Collective – fabulous indie game artists and arcade-cab makers.

Anarcute was released on Steam and Itch.io today. It’s 10% off at Steam. It’ll stay that way until July 19th. You can also get it through the game’s site.

26 Comments

My anarchist senses are conflicted. Needs moar intellectualism and existential strife. But then it’d probably be super bleak and sad, cute animals fighting an endless uphill battle against vastly superior forces, trying to get their loved ones from being crushed by an innately unfair and unethical system. Pink bunnies are probably a better option, now that I think about it.

The bleakness of a super serious anarchist’s realism mixed with the inanity of the mainstream’s cute obsession has a nice juxtaposition.

It makes me think of the sadness I felt as a kid everytime I won a round of Settlers 3 and all my enemies would start exploding in coloured puffs with these pathetic sad but cute little sounds signaling their welcome into oblivion. It was how they’d just start wandering around that got me. It was like they were desperate, trying to outrun death. I was a fun kid.

This reminds me of a cynical thought I have every so often… ie. if baby seals looked like giant spiders instead of boneless teddy bears, no one would care if you clubbed them. It’s amazing how easily people can be controlled and directed by playing upon their paternal/maternal instincts.

Case in point: make a game about directing mob violence towards police forces, sans the cute animals, and it will probably be just as controversial as the GTA games. Add cute animals, and people will happily curbstomp officers to death without batting an eye.

Note that I’m not advocating entirely on behalf of police forces when it comes to real-world issues; obviously the case is more complex than that. I’m simply using this particular game as an example of how easily emotional appeals can confuse issues that we’d otherwise examine pragmatically.

Someone already made a game with more realistic people in, State of Emergency, and it didn’t really get noticed much. Mind you, it was published by Rockstar, and I guess in comparison to some of their other games, it’s pretty tame.

We haven’t stopped clubbing seals (though I think we stopped clubbing baby seals), and there were no restrictions in place until they almost became extinct as far as I recall.

I guess if there were colonies of huge spiders exactly the same thing would have happened if the fur was useful. Though more probably we would chain them up in factories producing silk unable to move with their legs atrophying from lack of use.

So yeah – we have extremely low barriers to cuteness but it doesn’t stop us killing anything that moves if there is a gain.

I loved Rampage! It taught me many very important life lessons, such as:
1) When life gets tough, find a human and eat them alive.
2) Smashing buildings is the solution to every problem,
and of course,
3) Don’t eat people that your friends need to eat.

Though the selection of cities raises a big question mark: Tokyo? (I mean, I really love Japan, but they seems to be the least anti-authoritarian culture I know. すみません。) Miami? Freakin’ Reykjavik?! Come on!
I think this definitely needs more Berlin!

Just as a side note, the population of Iceland is that of a single medium-sized city – about 300,000 people – so while the 10% figure speaks to the magnitude of protests, it doesn’t do so quite as loudly as one would think.

And the fact that the prime minister was told by the people to step down, and stepped down, even if he tried to hold onto his post for a bit first, is why I think that a full-blown riot in Reykjavik seems unlikely. As history shows, peaceful demonstrations are sufficient there.